Campaigner Fr Peter McVerry has warned an “avalanche of homelessness is coming” with up to 43,000 more families facing the prospect of having their homes handed over to vulture funds.

He made the comments in the wake of PTSB selling almost 11,000 family homes to a vulture fund and a day after it emerged that a homeless woman and her six young children were forced to sleep in a garda station.

The campaigning priest said the homelessness situation is spiralling out of control and warned it will get a lot worse of tens of thousands more mortgages are sold to vulture funds leading to mass evictions.

He told Today with Sean O’Rourke: “I think there is a catastrophe coming down the road. There are 43,000 mortgages in arrears at the minute for more than two years and the European Central Bank is putting pressure on the Irish Banks to get them off their books.

“Many of those over the next two or three years are going to be repossessed or sold to vulture funds.

“That could create an avalanche of homelessness which would simply swamp us.”

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This week the Irish Daily Mirror began a campaign to stop PTSB and other banks from selling off thousands of mortgages to vulture funds in a move which could result in mass evictions.

Zombie bank PTSB is pushing ahead with the sale despite being accused of lying to hide the fact it sold good mortgages on family homes to Start Mortgages which is an affiliate of US vulture fund Lone Star.

Because PTSB is 75 per cent owned by the State there is growing pressure on the Government to intervene to stop this sale going ahead.

Homelessness campaigners fear that if PTSB gets away with this deal the other banks will believe they have the green light to offload up to 43,000 distressed mortgages to other vulture funds.

Many of these properties will undoubtedly be repossessed resulting in thousands more families being homeless.